Past Project: The Shed

As the weather is turning nicer around here, we're finding ourselves spending a little more time outside. I'll admit, I'm not one of those Pacific Northwest people who can just ignore the rain and head on out to play in it anyway so I tend to stay indoors for most of the rainy season. It seems that's finally trying to come to an end as we've been getting nice days here and there. This brings me to a project we actually did last summer but I'd like to revisit it because it made a huge difference in our back yard.

When we moved into the house, we had a shed that looked like this:

It is painted the same color as our house and has the same red trim running along the roof line. This shed is really great, initially it just held some gardening stuff but then I eventually moved a lot of my tools including my awesome mobile work bench out into it so I have a little workshop. The divided door was a fake though, it was one solid piece of plywood, not a dutch door as it would appear.

Here's the bigger problem though: The door fell off. It seemed just fine when we bought the house (not that it would have been a deal breaker) but as we used it, the hinges lost their grip in the rotting wood of the frame and the door and the whole darn thing just eventually stopped working. Finally, one Saturday, I decided enough was enough and we got to work fixing the door using 1 new piece of plywood, 1 partial can of new paint (I had plans to paint the shutters on the front of the house anyway so we were in the market for fantastic red paint), 1 partial can of house paint left from the previous owner and some scrap wood. I salvaged all the old hardware because I've found that stuff like giant hinges can really set you back when you're trying to do a project on a budget.

Here's the new door before we painted:

As I wasn't blogging at the time, I didn't take step-by-step photos to show you how to make your own dutch door so I won't drag you through the details. Mostly, I just hope this post serves to provide some inspiration if you have a doorway that needs a dutch door. It was really pretty easy, even considering the doorway was nowhere near square any longer so all the cuts had to be very specific. In the end, here's our new shed door along with some additional trim paint to give the whole thing more charm:

As I recall, this took us about a Saturday of building (it was a joint effort between building and keeping O out of trouble so this wasn't hours of our undivided attention) and a few weekends of me painting a coat of paint here and there. The new door is truly a split door now so we can air it out without fear of the little guy wandering in to get into things. I also installed a latch lock on the inside that big people can reach from the outside when the top door is open. Another addition is the little shelf to the right of the door, that's for the lock. We keep a padlock on the door when we're not using it so that little shelf is a perfect holding spot for the lock when it isn't in place.

I love projects like this. Everything truly fell into place and it is so much nicer to look at than the old door. It was quick and easy with a huge payoff.

Meet Julie

I'm a stay at home mom from Seattle and I can't sit still. My first passion is my family but from there on out it's just a scattered mix of things I love to do . . . or at least try to do. My husband is my biggest champion, closely followed by our sons. I'm a very lucky girl.